More than twenty business and IT leaders gathered on March 16, 2011 to participate in DMC’s Team Collaboration Breakfast Workshop hosted at Microsoft’s Midwest Headquarters in Downers Grove.

Led by Rick Rietz, DMC’s Director of Consulting Services, the workshop focused on how to make the switch to a collaborative company culture by applying technology like Microsoft SharePoint to ease the transformation. Participants were treated to a series of ideas and success stories about making change take hold in organizations where change is difficult to make happen. Each guest completed a Team Collaboration Playbook with dozens of exercises aimed at creating a personal plan for creating a culture of collaboration in their organization. A demonstration of SharePoint 2010’s communication, collaboration and dashboard features concluded the event.

Everyone in attendance also received a copy of the Heath Brothers’ best-seller Switch. Switch uses a three-part theme (rider, elephant, and path) to illustrate the challenges most organizations face in creating change and to suggest strategies to make change last. Attendees learned the importance of motivating the emotional side (elephant), appealing to one's logical perspective (rider), as well as creating an easy path for people to follow when attempting to create a lasting organizational change. The concepts of Switch provided a fun and relatable theme throughout the workshop.

Rick Rietz noted “Making it easy to share ideas and knowledge with others is essential to establishing a culture of collaboration. Participants who had not adopted SharePoint were very encouraged to see how SharePoint 2010 made it easy for non-technical staff to contribute their ideas and knowledge to the organization.” Rick was surprised by the large number of workshop participants who were already using SharePoint. He added, “However, I was not surprised that many of them had only scratched the surface of SharePoint’s collaborative capabilities. Several of these participants told me they learned a lot about SharePoint today and how to make lasting change take root in their organization.”

Taking Next Steps

With over 100,000,000 world-wide users, Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as the de facto collaboration platform for business. SharePoint provides businesses with a cost-effective way to leverage the Microsoft technology they already own to drive their business to operate more efficiently and more competitively through a multitude of capabilities.